A Kitchen in Queens

I absolutely love eating in New York City.  The food here is amazing, there’s so many varieties, you can get anything you want, pretty much whenever you want.  I’m constantly eating out in the city, or in Brooklyn with friends, and occasionally I can talk them into coming to Queens.  However, it’s rare that I actually go over to someone’s house to eat, so when Sonja invited me over to break in her new wok with some thai food, I couldn’t turn her down.  When she said she needed a good vegetable side dish, I couldn’t help but recommend that I make some delicious Thai corn fritters with cucumber dipping sauce.  Now, I realize that Thai corn fritters, although a vegetable are a big fried vegetable, so it might not quite fit the bill, but who could turn down a corn fritter?!

I headed over to Sonja’s after losing my volleyball (yes, I play volleyball, but we’re not very good, we do it for fun) scrimmage and drinking with the team.  A bit buzzed off a glass of cheap red wine, which was filled to the tippy top of my glass (the bartender loves us because we’re there every week!), I made my way with all my ingredients to Green Point.  

Sonja had already seasoned her wok and was ready to go.  A nice mix of relaxing indie rock music and gangster rap filled the air as we proceeded to prep for dinner.  Our very funny and extremely talented photographer friend Tim Soter came over with a nice bottle of wine. Generally not a white wine drinker, I had a glass and was pleasantly surprised by how refreshing it was.

The dinner came together rather quickly.  Fritters were fried and we sat down to nosh. The reality is, fritters are not a side dish, they are an appetizer, but we had to be careful not to fill up on their fried goodness, we had dinner coming too!

Sonja’s had prepped the spices for her dish before I arrived, and when I walked in, the room smelled of lemongrass and chili.  Evil Jungle Prince with Chicken.  A Thai dish I had never heard of!  What could be better?  

As Tim and I chatted about various things, Sonja worked in the kitchen, stir frying the spices with chicken and coconut milk.  The room filled with an amazing scent.  ”whew!  I hope you guys like it spicy!”  Luckily, I LOVE spicy!

One of the things I love most about thai food is how simple it can be, and yet how delicious it is.  The level of spicy was perfect.  Not overwhelming you could taste the lemongrass through the burn of the spice on your tongue.  It was a slow burn.  The kind that sneaks up on you after a minute.  The kind where you say, “I wish this was just a bit spicier”, but by bite three you realize you’re lucky it’s just at the level it is, but can’t admit that out loud.  You try not to sweat because you’ve already stated that it’s not quite spicy enough, but in reality there’s a little fire happening in your mouth.  The kind where after 10 minutes, you realize you’ve made the mistake of putting your meat and sauce over rice instead of next to it, and now, even your rice too hot to handle. 

It was perfect.  Dinner was perfect.  The company was perfect, and Tim Soter said some very funny things at dinner, including, “I’ll have to find something really funny to say for your blog.”